Montessori style: tweezing marshmallows

I love Montessori-style activities, especially for my three’s. I am particularly attracted to those that fall under practical-life exercises. Children learn how to focus, concentrate, and fine-tune fine motor skill by engaging in every day kinds of tasks. This specific lesson has the bonus of strengthening the concept of one-to-one correspondence as well. It seems that there isn’t a single child in the class that doesn’t participate in these kinds of activities at some point in the day regardless of age.

To begin, I set out a small storage tray from which I removed the lid, a cup of marshmallows, and some tweezers.

The children naturally figure out to tweeze the marshmallows into the separate compartments. The squishy factor of the marshmallows even made it a little easier for the younger children to grasp, which was a bonus. Yay!


The end!

grinding coffee beans

I had some old coffee beans in my cabinet so I thought we would finish them off by grinding them with our mortar and pestle. Oh, the aroma was delicious! It brought me back to my college days when I was a barista at U of I! :)

The beans proved fairly easy to grind:

The children wanted to 'make coffee' but alas, it was caffinated.

The end!

lentils in the sensory table

 I think lentils are my new favorite. They feel good in my hands. They pour so nicely. I think the children agree.

In this photo the children found the funnel with a wide enough opening to allow the lentils to pass through. They discovered using a funnel makes pouring lentils into the empty bottle makes filling it go much faster.

Lentils are also fun to haul:

Sometimes they get away from us, but working together to use the broom to clean them up is fun, too:

the ball run

I found this post in my dashboard marked under 'drafts' dated December 3rd. Whoops!
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I’ve had these pieces of cove molding and halved cardboard tubes since the end of the last school year. No one seemed interested in them until now, and the children are on fire creating ball and marble runs.

So far they have learned how to connect two ramps together so the marble continues to roll. They also know which ramps work best for which balls. I insist that they have some sort of ‘ball trap’ so all the round objects don’t scatter across the room. The ball traps have gotten pretty elaborate!

Ball trap which has been 'blocked':

The end!


ETA: The children have done such wonderful things with ramps since their first experience and I can't wait to blog about it!

tea time!

The morning class had been showing an interest in making tea in the sand box. I thought it would be nice for them to really experience the process of making real tea. So Ms. Ri brought in her teapot and Sue lent us teacups and saucers, and we set the table with a lacy cloth. We put the kettle on and waited for the whistle to tell us the water was boiling. We added our tea bags and Ms. Erin poured the hot water.

We had to wait patiently for the tea to steep and cool down enough for us to drink. It was hard to wait so long! Eventually we used spoons to stir and blow on our tea. The spoons made satisfying clinking noises, so that was a bonus even if it probably wasn’t good manners. Then we learned how to sip tea while we had snack.

Some of the children’s thoughts:

Mine tastes a little bit ucky.
I like that it’s good.
Mine tastes sweet.
My favorite part is stirring it.
Mine’s purple.
We smelled the tea bags, it’s delicious.
You have a pink cup. I have a white cup. I have a green and white cup with flowers on it.

winter ice ornamnets

With the below freezing wind chills, I thought it was a good time to try making ice ornaments. We reused disposable cereal cups as the mold for our ornaments and filled them with items from our ‘Beautiful Stuff’ collage collection.

After we filled the cups the children used watercolor paint and droppers to add color to their ornaments. Initially we only had a small amount of cups so each child could only make one (normally we have enough for each child to create until they are ‘done’. I practically had to swear on the life of my firstborn that we would make more on Monday.   

The results add a nice splash of color to our white winter wonderland!

scooters and bean bags

This great gross motor activity came from a very nice lady, Dr. Divya Sood, of our university’s occupational therapy department This is an activity she recommended for children who could benefit from vestibular stimulation. I'm not going to lie, I just Googled vestibular system.

What I did was have the children lay on their stomachs on scooters. The object was to scoot around, pick up bean bags and scoot them to a bucket. As the bean bags came in, I threw them back out on the floor. At first I threw them at random, but then I placed them strategically so that they had to scoot farther distances to acquire them.  

The children had a blast.